For the next year, Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com competed, each asserting that it had a better selection and lower prices. Barnes & Noble laid claim to a deeper catalog; Amazon ramped up efforts to find rare and out-of-print books, assigning employees to track down books in independent bookshops and at antique-book dealers. In 1998, Barnes & Noble would spin off its dot-com subsidiary with a $200 million investment from German media giant Bertelsmann and later take the company public. Amazon would then outflank the bookseller by rapidly expanding into other product categories like music
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